From the streetlamps, light in frozen citrine arcs that sheath the trees. Police sirens, couples walking home with boxes of take-away, grasping onto one another, arms held out for balance as if to test the viability of air in sub-zero temperatures, laughing at near-escapes from gravity.

A town under ice, suddenly.

Weeks ago, an anonymous artist left folded squares of paper thumbtacked to telephone poles and taped to parking meters.

TAKE ME was written on them in black felt-tipped capital letters. And then, once taken,

OPEN ME.

And they were opened to a picture of two outstretched palms, black and white with the lines a kind of gray screed, and across them was written

HOLD ME.

A dismissable project, that seemed to annoy as much as inspire.

Now the crumbled hands lay discarded across the town, brittle in the new ice, clenched in iced rigor mortis, as if grasping for the night itself, the still-born winter, as if looking to hold onto it before it turns into something worn,

something that we are all used to.